As I watched the slime continue to headbutt the invisible wall, I said, “Miike, can you try taking it out of here?”
“Yes, sir!” He ran over at once.
The slime noticed him and tried to attack, but he evaded and managed to get a firm hold of it. In that state, he tried going down the stairs.
“Great Ryota, it’s not working. I can’t go down,” he reported, visibly troubled. Miike himself was able to go down a few steps, but the slime stayed at the boundary and made it impossible for him to keep going.
“How does it feel?”
“Umm, it feels like the slime is stuck on an invisible wall.”
“I see. Oh, what about the warp gate?”
“Ah… I’ll try it!” He pitter-pattered back up the stairs and headed toward the vortex of light that connected back to the mansion. Then, with slime in hand, he tried jumping into it. “It still isn’t working, Great Ryota. Exact same feeling.”
“Really? Okay, that’ll do.”
Miike then gave up and brought the slime back to me.
I tried one last thing. After taking the slime from him, I held it tight so it couldn’t struggle and went to the stairs. I pushed it into the invisible wall, but it couldn’t go through. It was an odd feeling when it suddenly slipped out of my hands, making me stumble as it was no longer pulling back on me.
Next, I tried firing a trash round at the slime. They often helped at times like this thanks to how they always continued at the same pace, ignoring any and all interference.
The slime’s body was deformed by the trash round pushing into it, but it still could not go into the staircase.
“Ah…”
Poof!
Whoops. I overdid it a little.
I’d misjudged when to give up, getting the slime stuck between my trash round and the invisible wall and causing it to burst from the pressure.
“Y-You killed it.”
“Yeah. My bad.” I grimaced.
“What happens now?” Miike asked.
“Now that you mention it…”
The slime had been copied and trapped on this floor. What happened to the fakes when it died, then? Now curious thanks to Miike’s question, I walked him through the floor of the tower.
The situation immediately became clear as a shadow appeared before us─not a fake slime, but a shadow.
“Looks like…it’s back to how it originally was.”
“I think so…”
“Let’s try this again.”
“I’ll go catch another, then.”
“Nah. This’ll be faster.” I took out a normal bullet, put it on the ground, and backed off with Miike.
After a while, it became a slime outsider. With the slime in hand, we walked around more, ran into another shadow, and threw the slime at it.
We…tried to make more fake slimes to test, but something went wrong.
“It’s not changing, is it?”
“Sure isn’t.”
Despite my recovery round support, even when the shadow scored a hit on the slime, it didn’t turn into a fake slime like before.
Could it be?
☆
During the third round of testing, Neptune came to visit and saw me among cockro slimes.
“Goodness, you never cease to amaze,” he said. “It has to be the original, and you can’t make imposters from outsiders. Nobody would ever figure that out normally. I mean, nobody would ever even realize that you could turn them into monster imposters!”
“It’s not me. It’s Miike’s power.”
“Would he exist if not for you, though?” Neptune replied with a smile. Miike was a unique monster transformed by the Bodley Ryota wine, so it was true; if not for me, he wouldn’t exist in his current form. “So, I see you’ve been testing. What have we learned today?”
I arranged the information I’d gained so far and shared, “When a shadow attacks a human or an original monster, fakes appear. Defeat twelve and bring the stars to zero, and the original gets locked on this floor.”
“And if they’re not on this floor?” he continued questioning me. Naturally, I’d considered that possibility, since the four people still stuck on floor one to floor four were my primary concern.
“I had Miike take a slime back to the mansion after making the fakes. After I’d killed twelve, it was forcefully summoned here.”
“I see.”
“But it was a monster, so it died the instant it came.”
“Of course. They still can’t move between dungeons or floors.”
“I think it just traps you here if all of your stars disappear, though it might be too soon to draw conclusions.”
“If that’s true…” Neptune muttered.
“Hm?”
“We may need to recruit people who can accept working in this dungeon for the rest of their lives.”
“Oh? Yeah, maybe.” I hadn’t thought of that. I’d come to Tennessine to help Neptune (and now myself); he was here to investigate its potential as a production site. Our differences in position were reflected as different conclusions.
“Yep. If that’s all of the information we have so far, then we just need to hire people with low combat capabilities who can live here indefinitely.”
I didn’t like that condition, but it was a dungeon for high-quality foodstuffs. They could just promise people a good salary.
“This dungeon should be worth a lot of taxes, so that’s not a bad─” My eyes went wide. So wide that my eyelids felt like they’d split.
“What’s up?” Neptune asked.
I moved without saying a word, hoping to confirm whether the flash of inspiration in my mind would prove correct. I killed the original cockro slime in a safe place guarded by Miike, turning the monsters of this floor back into shadows. Then, I brought over a sleep slime we’d kept on standby and threw it at a shadow.
This turned all of the shadows on this floor into sleep slimes.
I killed six, cutting the original’s stars in half.
“Miike, bring me that sleep slime.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s the plan?” Neptune stood by me. Just as I hadn’t realized it before, he still hadn’t caught on because investigating the dungeon was his main priority.
I guided the two of them up to floor six.
Dungeon snow fell on floor six of Tennessine. When a shadow appeared, I threw the sleep slime to it, turning floor six monsters into sleep slimes as well. The original sleep slime’s six stars became twelve again.
Twelve. The maximum.
“I knew it!”
“Yeah!”
Neptune and I ran back to floor five. The sleep slimes there had turned back into shadows.
“Amazing! Amazing, my man,” Neptune rejoiced.
Running out of stars was disastrous, but we could reset the counter by using a different floor. This knowledge took a huge burden off my shoulders.